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5 Biggest Lessons From Publishing Online for 5 Years
Quit assuming the worst
Five years ago, I hit publish for the first time.
At the time, I was stuck in a 9–5 career I hated. My job was in sales, but I studied finance on the side as I was determined to retire early.
I openly shared all I knew with friends and coworkers as I wanted to fill in the gaps that college didn’t teach us. After helping enough people, someone at work said I should start a blog.
I figured why not — even though I had no clue what a blog was. So to start 2016, I put the new year momentum to use and launched my first blog. A week later, I hit publish on arguably one of the worst pieces of content on the internet.
But I did it.
I started.
While it sounds cliché, this one decision created a butterfly effect in my life. 15 months later, I quit my 6-figure job to blog and pursue professional golf. Some called it a quarter-life crisis, while I thought it was the only route to find happiness in my work.
Since then, I’ve become a top freelance golf writer, built a 6-figure writing business, and now coach other writers. Not to mention, I never had to crawl back to a 9–5 that I hated so much.
Don’t get me wrong, there was plenty of stress, anxiety, fear, imposter syndrome, and more, but it was all worth it.
But none of it would’ve happened if I didn’t start. I want to help more writers than ever this year by sharing these five biggest lessons that have led to my version of success.
Quit assuming the worst
Writing is an extremely vulnerable activity, and our mind doesn’t help make it any easier to hit publish. When I first started writing, hitting the publish button terrified me. Every time I did, I kept thinking people would tell me how awful my writing was, how wrong my content was, and that I should quit entirely.
If I’m honest, that did happen once. When I published a blog in 2016, a guy I went to high school with messaged me on Facebook and told me I should quit because it was so poorly written. Looking back, he wasn’t wrong.
